World Wide Elvis

Feb 6, 2000

The World Wide Elvis Website is this weeks "victim" in our series of reviews. This site has a lot to offer to the (average) Elvisfan. If you're looking for a certain - hard to get - release from some obscure country, this is probably the place to be (when you have a lot of money).
Design
The site has has a plain three-frames-setup wit a simple top-, menu- and content-frame. This helps navigation, since you can only click "left" and look "right". Some menu-items link to only one item, others link to enormous pages. The webmaster has a strange taste in colours, not all colours match and some really "hurt the eye". And it's amazing how often he changes background-colours.
Also we think it's a pity that good ideas on the Internet are copied so often, in this case the banner, which is obviously based on the banner of the "For Elvis CD Collectors Only" website.
The images used on the site are obviously gathered around the world wide web, they have many different sizes and don't always fit into the (multi coloured) background of this site. Paul Dowling webmaster uses a (once) much used menu lay-out, covers of singles, albums or books, most webmasters left this idea some time ago, but for this site it still is effective regarding content.
Rating: 6/10
Content
This site used to be a great source of up-to-date information, but the webmaster has been busy ... with something else, since the last couple of months the site has hardly been updated.
The obvious goal of this site is to sell, and that shows. Every piece of information has a pricetag. Surfing the site this gets a annoying, especially looking at some prices.
For the collector this page is a "jewel" for the avarage fan it makes the water "run through the mouth", you know it's out there, but to get it ...
The webmaster was one of the first to add commends to his linkspage, and he seems to be friends with everybody he links to. Some links are dead, something every webmaster must check every once in a while.
The idea to review fanclubmagazines is a good one (we are initiating this very idea right now), but like with other items on his site, the webmaster started with a great idea, but didn't keep it up to date so the page lost it's value.
Sometimes it's hard to find the new content the webmaster added to a certain page. he mentiones he changed somethin on the top of a (long) page, but have to scroll down the page to find it yourself. For example, on the BMG page, the news is ordered by country. So you have to check the entire page to find where the particular country is listed. Perhaps it's an idea to add a link to the mentioned updates so you can click on it to find what you're loooking for.
Rating: 6/10
Advice:
Our advice to the webmaster is to be more consequent in the use of colours and backgroundimages to make the site look more attractive. This is particulary important when you have something (special) to sell. It looks like the webmaster listed everything he has in stock, using long pages to show everything. We think it's better to slice some pages into seperate ones, amplifying each other (using clear links). We understand that the real die-hard fan will search (long) for that one special item, something most general-fans won't do.
Unfortunately we can't give Paul an award, but maybe we do give him some visitors by reviewing his site.